Gemma Open Door: 27 books

The Charles River divides Boston and Cambridge, and the Red Line ties the cities together, traveling through an expanse of class and cultures along its route. When an unlikely combination of riders share an afternoon train, they are surprised to discover what's common in their American experience. Part...

Can a tired marriage be saved by man?s best friend? Jo and John are slowly drifting apart. Their marriage has been stalled for years, but they carry on, pretending to be together. Then the unthinkable happens: John is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Jo is overcome with sadness and regret. There just...

John Blaine is a private detective who works Dublin's mean streets. He is tough, talented and smart, but always unlucky in love. His wife has just left him, and he's sad and sorry. Now, hired to bring home a stray daughter of the rich, he takes the girl's side against her powerful father, and suffers...

When Mark Buehrle threw his perfect game against Tampa Bay, it was DeWayne Wise, the ninth inning White Sox defensive sub who made the leaping, back against the wall catch of a fly ball, robbing Gabe Kapler of a home run and preserving Buehrle’s achievement. Until that moment, Wise was virtually...

Sam Peterson is your average high school student?until he falls through a portal in time and space and lands in the studio of Leonardo da Vinci. This is worse than algebra! Da Vinci was a futurist. He imagined the airplane, the helicopter, submarine, and more—long before anyone else. Who better...

The year was 1947. A talented young minor-league baseball player was called up to the majors to join the Brooklyn Dodgers. But this was no ordinary man, nor any simple achievement. This was Jackie Robinson: an all-around star athlete, a U.S. Army veteran—and a black man. Until that year, baseball’s...

Sarah Holloway is a frustrated painter, sketching on the backs of shopping lists and sharing her studio with a washer and dryer. Abandoned by her mother, she has tried to hide her childhood wounds by healing others through art therapy. During her daughter’s first two years, she has faked her way...

A family tale for new readers, from a New York Times Notable author in her stride. A young girl leaves Tokyo with her mother in 1979, carrying her pink suitcase to a new home, a new father and sister, on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. Thirty-three years later, her mother's belongings are found packed...

The city is Dublin, the year is 1972. Redser and Pancho are two teenagers from the North Wall. Redser is top of the class, especially good at math. Pancho's knack is finding money, not adding or subtracting it. Redser's parents run the local credit union. Pancho's dad runs riot in the city pubs on...

In 1878, two years after the Greasy Grass Fight that some called Custer’s Last Stand, U.S. soldiers and government contractors rounded up 270 Arapaho people. From the very young to the very old, they were forced to walk from Fort Robinson in western Nebraska across half of what is now the state...

What do you do when Fate shows up in your rose bed with three-inch canines and retractable claws Robert--not Bob!--Stevenson wakes up one morning in his Vermont home to find a Bengal tiger sitting in his rose garden. Is the tiger real? Or has the illness that has invaded every other part of Robert's...

Training for adulthood is not for wimps. When you are eleven years old, is there anything more humiliating, or bound to cause a fight, than shopping with your mother when your body is in full-throttle warp? Yes, there is: picking out the school-required underwear. Or worse, your mother’s...

The American writer Suzanne Kamata had lived in Japan for more than half of her life, yet she had never explored the small nearby islands of the Inland Sea. The islands, first made famous by Donald Richie’s The Inland Sea 50 years ago, are noted for displaying artwork created by prominent, and sometimes...

Suddenly driven from their African home by a war in Biafra, the McCall family washes up in a small town in the San Joaquin Valley. The locals assume they must be glad to be back in the "civilized world." But life in America is lonely, desolate and dull, and the children and their  fragile...